Ah, skeuomorphism - my favourite punching bag. Austin Carr has spoken to former Apple designers and people within the company, and they're all confirming there's a rift within Cupertino between people who want to move away from skeuomorphism, and people who want to retain it as much as possible, and even want to expand it. Since I've long hoped for Apple to ditch this "visual masturbation", as one former Apple designer calls it, I'm happy to learn not the entire company supports skeuomorphism.

Personally I don't care much for fake leather or skeuomorphism, partly because I don't even see it. My eyes and brain have adapted to only see and process what I need and ignore the rest, like skeuomorphism, ads or unimportant details.

This makes me wonder, if someone use iCal, I mean really use it and not just launch 'n' look, is this fake leather stuff really that eye catching and distracting? It's just a small bar with a few buttons, does this really sabotage your productivity?

Much more important, for me, is the menubar and it's always at the top and it's always pretty consistent in its layout. If this was molded in to some skeuomorphism that would be annoying, but it isn't.

This makes me wonder, if someone use iCal, I mean really use it and not just launch 'n' look, is this fake leather stuff really that eye catching and distracting? It's just a small bar with a few buttons, does this really sabotage your productivity?

In the grand scale it matters very little. But it is amazing that they took the time to uglify something that was perfectly usable and neutral before. It does boggle the mind that somebody at Apple compared the two and said "yes, I'll go with the turd, it looks better".

I replaced the graphical elements with fixed versions.There are colours that I like and perfectly neutral don't think anybody can claim that standard grey is ugly, but that brown probably isn't the favourite of many people. I've yet to talk to anybody prefers the faux leather to the old chrome.